Everything is Whirling and Twirling! What Are You Reading this Summer 2023?

The second edition was researched and published in the 80s, I think. The science fiction story reflected some awareness that was around, at least on mid-40s geek fringes (as well as among those with security clearances).

Kenan Malik Not So Black And White.
Quite interesting. Summarises history of race I've read elsewhere. Reasonably well written.vast bibliography to point me to further reading.

dow, I have not, sounds interesting. According to this anthology there's actually a lot of published testimonials from victims, tho who knows how many have been translated.

I read Alex Kazemi’s New Millennium Boyz, couldn’t put it down, really.

It poses some interesting challenges for readers, as it pretty aptly documents the attitudes, patois, and behaviors of suburban white teenage boys in the US around the turn of the millennium. That is to say: the book contains a lot of misogyny, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and violence.

I escaped the sort of environment that the book documents by the time it really mattered, but my middle school years were reflected back at me through the book. (Fwiw, I was basically “taken out” of the school system because I was being mercilessly bullied for a number of reasons). It does an equally good job of depicting Y2K culture, from PBS (which the kids call “Parents BullShitting”) to popular music to the rise of the internet and early online video culture.

And I think that part of its point is that mainstream handwringing over what is happening to a certain class and race of young men is largely bullshit, not because young men aren’t in crisis, but because the handwringing does little to change the culture of how young men are raised in USAmerican society. The book suggests, through its action, that the hollow center of the culture, its banality and stupidity, builds and allows for hollow and broken young men to perpetuate the social ills I mention above.

Whether it needed to utilize the moves that it does is certainly up for debate, but it gets at some things about my own experience growing up that I found illuminating.

One of them, perhaps the question that the book asks in the end, is whether the then-new hypervisibility, self-as-brand, and lack of privacy actually makes us more invisible to ourselves and those around us. Still a potent, if perennial, question.

I am about 3/4 of the way through Harlem Shuffle. It's very well-written. Some passages are just gorgeous. However, if I'm comparing it to his last novel (which, tbf, won the Pulitzer), it seems a little . . . the words that come to mind are "light" and "directionless." It's more of a caper than anything weightier. I suppose it's unfair to expect every book from a writer to be as impactful as his or her best work.

finished Mishima's "The Sound of Waves" last night, going to dig back into Chateaubriand's memoirs, which i made it about 1/3 of the way through last winter.

ton of things, especially some more recent stuff (fiction and non-fiction), that i need to get from the library soon; just a question of making the push to put it all on hold at my local branch.

this thread both inspires and overwhelms me on the reading front

I'm a few pages from finishing The Last Grain Race, Eric Newby, about his time spent as an apprentice deck hand, aged 18, on a four-masted sailing ship, circling the globe from Belfast to South Australia, picking up a load of wheat, and returning with it to England in 1938-39. It was written in the mid-1950s and is somewhat more ironic than the usual wooden-ships-and-iron-men genre (note: the ship was steel-hulled).

It shares some characteristics with Two Years Before the Mast in that Newby is a public school product interpreting life in the lower reached of the working class. Except where it diverges into long explanations about the ship's rigging and other technical details, it is readable and amusing enough. But Newby is not Orwell of Down and Out in Paris and London. Even though he is clear enough about the low pay, back-breaking work, bad food, and mortal dangers of the job, he has no real interest in the class system. Basically, he is just slumming.

The Matrix by Lauren Groff. Nun lit (see also The Corner That Held Them), at the halfway point it almost dips its toe into fantasy or magical realism but it mostly seems to want to stay on the straight and narrow.

The Italian Teacher by Tom Rachman. Birkbeck College is mentioned as a path to advancement for a minor character, a clerk at Imperial Foods owned by Mr. Khan who is married briefly to the protagonist and comes to live in London for a new life. I've read a few novels by Rachman and in his writing think I detect the discipline (and limits) of his having previously written for a news publication, which I read somewhere while reading his first novel and so may not be entirely objective. (Separately, I am wondering how UCL fits within the system.)

It's strange to think that Lorrie Moore is a responsible adult now and writes about bands that I knew. I like getting to know obliquely the cross section of America that she writes about and her experience in it. I am gladthat the protagonist was able to hold her own when she did and I especially liked the parts about her cutting loose when she was adrift.

Rachman is appealing if you fantasize about living abroad.

King Solomon's Mines, H Rider Haggard - Quartermain probably the least read of the characters from Moore's original League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen? A big game hunter in Africa immediately conjuring more troublesome things than, say, an invisible man. So yeah this is about Quartermain helping a guy out whose brother has disappeared and discovering a Lost Kingdom. The portrayals of the African characters, while mostly "benign", also tend towards the paternalistic - I was surprised though to read a paragraph where Quartermain makes a big deal out of not using the n word, which he dislikes, and states that some "natives" are gentlemen while some rich white men are not. This struck me not as particularly impressive anti-racism from Haggard but because it suggests that even in Great Britain circa 1880 the word already had a stigma amongst some white people, which I wasn't aware of.

Less serious but of course the hunting sequences are also a bummer, particularly when they're not doing it to survive: lots of talk about "poor beasts" and moments of compassion for the dying animals. Don't shoot them then, Allen!

Anyway outside of all that the novel has an amusing author's voice, Quartermain sometimes coming across as a child's idea of a hero - he remarks often on his companion's propensity towards swearing, which amounts to said companion saying "God" and "Jesus" at times. Also as Alec Guiness said about the script to Star Wars - I want to know what happens next.

KSM and She were big films and are often repeated on the lesser freeview channels. but those are the only two from the list of 40+ things he wrote that i recognise.

In The Italian Teacher, the one character who knows both the father and the son is Marsden. I am curious about what could have happened without an imagined deadline or word limit but am not certain that that character would have been right (otherwise, Natty, or less likely, Birdie or Barrows).

barbara tuchman - a distant mirror

my second tuch. this is her book about the 14th century. it’s a pretty fat tome and i’ve been reading a few pages before bed each night, at this rate it’ll take me a year to finish it. definitely slower and denser than guns of august (which i gobbled up in a few sittings) but she’s such a great writer. every paragraph is dripping with “the sauce”

My sense is that every boomer in the UK has read KSM but their kids will only have read it if there was a copy on the shelves growing up.

barbara tuchman - a distant mirror

my second tuch. this is her book about the 14th century. it’s a pretty fat tome and i’ve been reading a few pages before bed each night, at this rate it’ll take me a year to finish it. definitely slower and denser than guns of august (which i gobbled up in a few sittings) but she’s such a great writer. every paragraph is dripping with “the sauce”

― flopson,

I'm glad you mentioned her. I've wondered if she's still worth a read (and if her stuff remains accurate).

distant mirror is an incredible book.

guns of august was solid imo.

i've had her march of folly on my list for while, but it seems the most vulnerable to reappraisal on its historical merits.

Guns of August is certainly worth reading despite not being perfectly accurate. i recommend pairing it with a long book review of christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers like this one https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v35/n23/thomas-laqueur/some-damn-foolish-thing

Oh right I have March of Folly lying around the bed waiting to be read.
So need to do that and maybe these others

distant mirror is an incredible book.

guns of august was solid imo.

i've had her march of folly on my list for while, but it seems the most vulnerable to reappraisal on its historical merits.

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Tuesday, 19 September 2023 11:00 AM (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

im curious about the stilwell in china one

I found March of Folly to be the weakest of her efforts, unless you compare it to Stilwell and the American Experience in China., which is essentially just her doctoral thesis, seized on by her publisher in order to capitalize on the immense popularity of The Guns of August.

I always run into this with history books, constantly debating with myself whether to read the boring but superficially more accurate new one or the old one that reaches further into the ecstatic truth of vivid, aesthetically sublime writing.

If you want relentless accuracy, fact-by-fact (you can look 'em all up!) as nail-by-nail x overview as compelling narrative, try Timothy Egan: The Big Burn is the life of a forest fire in rich timberland---that burned an area the size of Connecticut in a weekend---when the U.S. Forest Service was itself seen as a Big or Bigger Burn by righteous capitalists. The Service is not presented as perfect by any means, but the story zooms from macro to micro and back at just the right times, with the struggle of different groups and individuals fighting the fire juxtaposed with how things are going back in D.C. (not too much of this shit)

Righteous capitalist catnip for The Pioneer Spirit sets the stage for environmental and social disaster in Egan's even deeper-digging The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl.

I'm starting into Persuasion, Jane Austen. Her prose is a precision instrument, just a pure pleasure in itself.

xp The Worst Hard Time has the distinction of being the most severely panned book in my book club, which has now been running for more that 10 years and has read more than 100 books.

Austen is gangsta

Finished Matrix. Some lovely writing but it felt mostly like a straight line journey from beginning to end, no major diversions or setbacks or unexpected events. In other words somewhat lacking in plot.

On to The Swimming Pool Library.

Swimming Pool Library is another, like Famished Road, that has been sat over there on the shelf for 30 years. ha, in fact, they are literally next to each other

(unread / unfinished)

I gave up on The Famished Road last year.

King Solomon's Mines does this (offensive) thing where the white explorers encountering a hidden civilization pass themselves off as wizards by using their modern weapons, familiar to me from many a children's cartoon and Carl Barks comic but I wonder if this is where the trope started.

My fav instance of it is in the (I'm sure otherwise not very good) Martin Lawrence vehicle Black Knight where Lawrence, transported to medieval times, turns on his lighter and goes "look, FIRE!" and one of the rampaging villagers just goes "well, we have fire".

David Olusoga Black & British
pretty decent history of black presence in Britain going back to Roman times.
It jumped forward to Tudor times to describe musicians at Henry VIII's court and then followed through teh start of the slave trade and hat it was easier to seize a shipment containing human cargo asa privateer than go through the whole process of buying from sourcel I've just read the cynical treatment of loyalists and black soldiers who fought for the loyalist side in the War of Independence in what was to become the States. & then gone through the scheme to move population incoming from that in Sierra Leone. Which I hadn't taken in previously was a combination of scam and wishful thinking by the guy who suggested Sierra leone. & that he had actually written an article/submission saying why the same place wasn't suitable as a penal colony shortly before suggesting it was a good place for a black colony.
Good book which I've meant to read for a long time but I've neglected since getting out of the library cos I'm in the middle of reading a stack of other things.

LUdd in the mist Helen Mirlees
fantasy novel that was a big influence on Neil Gaiman among others. & I was turned onto by reading his Welcome To The Cheap Seats recently.

Voodoo In Haiti Alfred Metraux
study from the mid 20th century looking at the syncretic religion and its effect on the population of the country it was prevalent in.
Its a bit racist, it is from 1947 so I guess that's to be expected. Probably could be a lot more so so maybe by comparative standards its like totally woke.
Pretty interesting and i think it is well known.
THink this was something I picked up from the bibliography of Federici's Caliban and the Witch . Another book I'm neglecting.

Bruno Bettelheim The Uses of Enchantment
Scholarly study on the subject of fairytales that I've meant to read for decades. THink I was looking at it the summer of 20 years ago and didn't get to read it

Toni Morrison Mouthful Of Blood
an anthology of shorter pieces by the black author. My current bathroom book

> I gave up on The Famished Road last year.

it's almost as if i remembered this rather than just bringing it up at random 8)

took a bunch of books to amnesty last saturday, mainly modernish sf that i know i will never read again (utopia, altered carbon, windup girl) and things i've bought as ebooks since (american gods). maybe these should follow.

Just started Deacon King Kong by James McBride.

(I find myself making up thread titles for Aimless the way I sometimes make up baby names or others might play video games. I was trying to find a way to incorporate the moon or moonlight without much success. The moon can really light up one's path.)

Deacon King Kong, otoh, was one of the most beloved book club reads. Fantastic book.

What were your book club's objections to The Worst Hard Time?

I think it was just the sheer unremitting misery of the narrative. I actually found it engaging.

Yeah, somehow he finds momentum in misery! Digging through the Dust Bowl.
The Big Burn might have more of that, moving with the crackling, drying flash of the fire, drying the melodramatic/disaster porn potential to plain detail and perspective and scale of physical=mental-emotional (also strategic and tactical) considerations, scale of aftereffects as well.

(fwiw, wiki sez TWHT

won the 2006 National Book Award for Nonfiction[2][3] and the 2006 Washington State Book Award in History/Biography.

I recently read the Keith Richards autobiography (with James Fox), "Life". I found it pretty enjoyable. At 550+ pages, perhaps it could've been trimmed a bit. The stories about the early days were the most interesting to me, and even though that "imperial" phase of the Stones only took up the first decade of their now 6+ decade run (5 decades at the time of writing), the book never completely lost my interest. For someone whose public image is taciturn, Richards seems rather loquacious in print. Not only that, he's a pretty decent raconteur, with a dry sense of humor and an ear for pungent turns of phrase. It seems like his two great loves in life are music, esp. blues and rock, and drugs, and he writes at length about both. The music parts were the more interesting parts for me. It would take a far more introspective writer than Richards to find something interesting to relate about the numberless drug experiences, which tend to become repetitive. But any way you slice it, he has lived an interesting life and managed to relate enough of it to carry the book, no doubt with the indispensable assistance of his co-author.

There Will Be Fire - Rory Carroll

vv compelling read, covering the IRA's plan to/failed attempt to assassinate Margaret Thatcher by bombing the Grand Hotel in Brighton. Not having known much about this story, it's fairly astonishing just how close they got to pulling off the unthinkable. The before mostly covers Thatcher's policies w/r/t Northern Ireland, bomber Patrick Magee's path towards this event, other bombings carried out, and the during is a fairly horrifying recreation of what actually occurred. The after is the tracking of the suspects, and the race to track down an IRA operative in Scotland who is part of a seemingly separate plot (and he is, but they're connected.) It achieves a nice balance without being "actually, both sides are etc etc..."

Like an old German I knew said of the failed plot to assassinate Hitler, the devil saved her.

My third Richard powers, Bewilderment. kinda meh

Also recently finished Robinson’s the dark beyond the stars. Way too long

I am about 3/4 of the way through Harlem Shuffle. It's very well-written. Some passages are just gorgeous. However, if I'm comparing it to his last novel (which, tbf, won the Pulitzer), it seems a little . . . the words that come to mind are "light" and "directionless." It's more of a caper than anything weightier. I suppose it's unfair to expect every book from a writer to be as impactful as his or her best work.

― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux), Saturday, September 16, 2023

Haven't read Harlem Shuffle yet, but it is apparently the first part of a trilogy. The second book, Crook Manifesto, was just published this summer.

I really loved the two books I've read by him, The Underground Railroad (which won the National Book Award) and The Nickel Boys (The Pulitzer)

Going through Le Carré's books in order, I've now read or reread all of the Smiley novels - "Call for the Dead", "A Murder of Quality", "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold", "The Looking-Glass War", "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy", "The Honourable Schoolboy", and "Smiley's People".

I'm a long way away from "Legacy of Spies", the distant follow-up published in 2017

My next book is "The Little Drummer Girl" from 1983, which I remember being my favorite Le Carré at the time

I've heard that The Crook Manifesto is better than Harlem Shuffle, maybe more of a genre/lit (or at least character study) balance, like his zombie-hunting Zone One(clean-up of v.valuable Manhattan real estate, cause you know the plague is over). I really enjoyed that one.

still, the preview of Harlem Shuffle seemed promising: POV of a fence, usually a flat weasel in crime stories, here a scuffling small store owner lured into the shade.

How did you find Smiley’s People? Got it on the shelf, tempted if put off by the size. Certainly it opens well.